There's always an idiot side to anything. On the other side, you have the Free & Open Source Computer, of course. This is not quite home for the Mighty Penguins Tamers Club as you would probably have guessed.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

I am always sorting out what still needs to be done in with all these computers over here so that everything is fine and everybody is happy: Family can watch movies, download music, colleagues can open my files and send me stuff back & so on.

One more of my unuseful sidenotes: a daughter of mine was willing to watch a movie this afternoon, asked for the laptop since the young one was busy watching TV in the mean time... I went it all the way, slipped the disc in, started VLC, passed the Lang & Subtitle menus, went to the movie and pressed the spacebar, Pause. HAnd over the laptop to the kiddo, said "that's it honey, it's paused you'll only got to press the spacebar again to watch your movie" 20 minutes later, I was upstairs & what, the big one is watching her movies on the TV. "Hey kiddo, I asked you to get me the Laptop back downstairs when you finished... But, what are you doin' anyway? She said that it "doesn't worked" and that Mom tried it as well & shot down the machine.Fuck people, that's about FOSS Advocacy again: So we have a computer where you just CAN'T watch a movie, that's it? I mean, simply slip the disc and push Play? Fuck, that's nuts really.

I sure can watch a movie, but it involves the kind of trickery that nobody else on earth is willing to learn just to watch a movie.

But then, back to my fantasy list; among stuff I thing shoulg go just right is: networking several machines in a single LAN. will give you a glimpse of what I am talking about. The fun part is the one with VLC where you grab someone elses desktop, mouse et al. and toy around from your station, that's too fun. Kids love it and, when you do have kids not even able to play a DVD by themselves, it can be useful. It's over-the-shoulder peering too, there isn' much privacy left for your target. Still, it can do stuff when it comes to Remote Graphic Administration, and would be a great tool to monitor the Web actuvity of kids in a classroom fdor instance.

And Now, Ladies & Gents, for the Blopper: try to switch down the remotemachine and it will crash as soon as you confirm. /bang. Must have something to do with the way itloses connection; frozen hard I can tell. To switch off, you have to do like with ssh: /sbin/shutdown -h -P now